Social media firms must prevent “humiliating”‘ explicit images getting on their platforms in the first place under a change in the law.
Currently laws focus on punishing those who create the content and who use or threaten to use explicit images against their partners or ex-partners. But a change in the law will now put an extra onus on tech companies who allow the harmful material on their sites.
The sharing of such images will be classified as the most serious type of online offence under the Online Safety Act, meaning social media platforms will now have to take steps proactively to remove it. The change to the law will see the sharing of intimate images without consent upgraded to be made a priority offence under the new online safety rules, which are due to come into force from spring next year.
Tech Secretary Peter Kyle said: “Once these images make it online, it has a terrible impact on those people who are the who are victims of it. It is humiliating. It is degrading. It has a terrible impact on the people who are affected. So what I want to do is stop these images going online in the first place. We have the criminal offence for creating it. Now I want to stop that ever going online in the first place, and that’s what the actions I’m taking today are on.”
The Labour minister said he wanted to make sure social media firms took responsibility and would be slapped with hefty fines if they did not tackle indecent image sharing on their platforms. He said: “What I’m trying to do is move away from the fact where these companies are allowed to produce products into our society, harms emerge, and then we deal with the harms. What I’m trying to do is make sure the safety is baked in from the outset, so the harms don’t emerge in the first place.”
Under the laws, material considered a priority offence – which also includes public order offences and the sale of weapons and drugs online – must not only be removed when it is found online, but platforms must also proactively remove it and take steps to prevent it from appearing in the first place – with large fines for those who fail to do so.
The Government said it hoped the crackdown would help drive the development of new and existing technologies to help keep people safer online, while also helping to tackle sexual offending and the normalisation of misogynistic material being shared online.
Technology Secretary Peter Kyle said he hoped requiring social media platforms to take more proactive action would “drive behaviour change”.
“What I’m trying to do is, rather than just see action once an offence had been committed and the damage has been done to a victim, is to try and change behaviour that will prevent it happening in the first place,” he told the PA news agency.
Mr Kyle said the introduction of the Online Safety Act would make safety an “unignorable issue” for social media companies, warning “they can no longer just look the other way or have other priorities”. The Technology Secretary also confirmed he would be “introducing legislation on frontier AI in this Parliament”, saying he did not want to see “new products and innovations crash into society and being negatively disruptive” and it then taking a “long time for us as legislators and regulators to catch up”.
He also said he was examining the possibility of strengthening laws around misinformation in the wake of the violent disorder on Britain’s streets in August.